Is it an indication of Steve Jobs' (in)famous strive for perfection, or just stupid bone-headedness? The white variant of the iPhone 4 was first delayed for a few weeks, but those few weeks became 'end of the year'. Now we know why: the manufacturers Apple employs are apparently having issues matching the shades of white of the various components. This anecdote ties in nicely with a very interesting interview with John Sculley about Steve Jobs' ways of doing business.

In my opinion, this feeling that engineering both hardware and software makes the product better is totally wrong in the case of desktop/laptop. I rather see it as an error : when people dislike Mac hardware, they ditch Mac software as well, while the latter is arguably much more well-done. It's just a profit loss.

There's really nothing wrong with computer hardware nowadays (well, except the overheating Acers), except if you want something *really* exotic and useless like a touchscreen to be duck-taped on it.

The sole thing that goes currently wrong in the PC market is that after both HW and SW are manufactured, HW manufacturers are in charge of putting those together and put loads of crap in software. For this to change, the OS manufacturer must be very clear : installing anything but drivers voids the hw manufacturer's right of selling the OS. They make hardware, software is not their realm.

Most of the other problems we have with our computers daily rather come from OS legacy, poor OS design decisions, and bad OS-software vendor interaction. It's this, in my opinion, that needs to be fixed... And it's the realm of software, not hardware.

In my opinion, this feeling that engineering both hardware and software makes the product better is totally wrong in the case of desktop/laptop.

I beg to differ.

Have a look at smartphones (they've become somehow the equivalent of the PC's of the 19xx in the 20xx era). Put something new like a compass in a phone and *poof* - new innovative software is written to the benefit of end users.

It's more difficult to get end user innovations without a vertical model i. e. a clear vision of a feature that consists of HW to support it and software to use it.

HW vendors have no real incentive for innovation without software vendors (which means primarily Microsoft) supporting new features properly.

I even think that the PC industry somewhat (not entirely) relies on vertical integrated vendors such as Apple as a driver or accelerator for progress (others like the game industry influence HW performance). We've all seen what happened to the adoption of things like USB, web cams or DVI out on laptops, etc. when vendors such as Apple start to push such technologies. It doesn't mean that Apple always succeeds (think FireWire), but it's one major first step for certain HW to gain traction.

The phone market is different from the PC market. There are a lot of possible HW/SW combinations, and no standard has emerged (and hopefully none will ever will, since phones answer much more varied use cases than computer so a single hardware would be a very bad idea)